Prisoner Again
by elenlaurelin
Summary: AU. Valjean never meets the Bishop, and things turn out differently.


A/N: This is my idea of what might have happened had Jean Valjean never met the bishop. It's AU. And, in case you feel tempted to correct me, I _do_ know to spell Tuileries and Luxembourg. It's intentional.

**Prisoner Again**

Prisoner 6829 hated his cell-mate. 49203 sneered constantly, and when 6829 was trying to get to sleep after a long, sore day's work, the man would kick at the bunk incessantly, so that 6829 could never get enough sleep. Of course, 49203 never did any work, if he could avoid it. He would always have some sort of excuse; a hurt foot, a head cold, bleeding. Usually, it wouldn't work, but when it did, it infuriated Prisoner 6829. He privately called 49203 "pest", and the pest always called 6829, to his great annoyance, "boar hound".  
  
It wasn't as though he didn't deserve the nickname. Boar Hound was stronger than most of his shipmates, and he could do tasks that sometimes earned him small privileges, like a few hours off on a workday, or an extra blanket for a few of the coldest nights of the mild Toulon winters. These privileges weren't official, but they served as an incentive, from some of the lesser officers, for him to be helpful.  
  
Pest often quizzed Boar Hound on his life before prison, although Boar Hound always insisted that there wasn't much to tell, since he had spent almost his entire life in prison. Pest was more than happy to take over in the silence that followed, however, and loved to talk about when he owned an inn in a small town outside of Paris.  
  
He also reluctantly discussed his life after he lost the inn, living as a robber in the depths of the Paris crime web, before the boy who lived next door felt sorry for the worthless servant they kept, and told the police about how she was beaten. And the police, happy for any excuse to catch a major criminal, had taken the opportunity to charge him with robbery, assault, burglary, and murder, among other things, and send him to the galleys for life.  
  
Boar Hound wasn't overly resentful, as he admitted to himself that he had been during his earlier prison days. A few years of life outside of prison when he was middle-aged had taught him splotchy life lessons, and perhaps even a few morals. Also, he admitted to himself, when one wore the green cap of a life sentence, he was treated slightly better than some of his counterparts with lesser sentences.  
  
In fact, the only aspect of his life that truly bothered him were his dreams.  
  
They came suddenly, usually when he was lying on his bunk, calm, but not quite asleep. They would begin with a little girl; or, at least, when they had begun, before the Pest had arrived, she had been little. Now, she was a young woman, but not much better off than she had been as a child. She was bony, and her ribs stood out achingly far from her thin stomach. She would wear a slight smile as she sat on the floor, playing with a stick, or a ball of yarn, or as she walked through a nameless town, at the side of a slightly better-dressed and –fed girl.  
  
Now, though, she rarely smiled. She more often wore a look of care, or fear, or pain. She was probably only sixteen, but she looked sixty. Once in a very long time, she would stare longingly at something beyond his field of vision. Boar Hound liked to pretend that she was his daughter, that he was raising her, but had accidentally left her in the care of someone who had forgotten about her, and that he would now take care of her, and she would become plump and happy again. He would buy her fine clothes, and take walks with her in the parks he had heard vague stories about. They would walk in the capital city, Paris, where everyone wore fine clothes, and the entire city was pervaded by fashion and philosophy. They would walk in gardens, like those at the Toliesies, and at the Loxenburg.  
  
But as time went by, the girl grew thinner; signs of malnutrition and abuse began to show up on her frail body. Soon after the Pest arrived, the bruises began to heal, but the signs of hunger never disappeared, until finally, one night, she disappeared all together, and Boar Hound never saw her again.  
  
In the very beginning, there had also been a woman. Boar Hound knew her from his brief days as a free man in some stagnant town north of Paris, where he had lived rather freely as a hired hand and, to some extent, a thief. He had met her when she was out on the streets one cold night, in such despair that she was selling herself. She had had such an air of tarnished innocence that he had felt drawn to speak to her, and had invited her into a dingy café to talk. She had told him the sort of story he was expecting; a beautiful grisette, she had fallen in love with a rich young man, who had taken advantage of her and then left her, with nothing but a small daughter, who she had left with some people in a suburb of Paris, before heading back to her hometown, where she had hoped to find work.  
  
Rejection had seemed to Boar Hound not unlikely, since the town's few businessmen were far from needing more workers, and from there, it was easy to see how she had found her way to the streets. After buying her a coffee, he had left the café, and had never seen her since. In his dreams, she lay on a coarse bed of straw, screaming hoarsely about her daughter, "Cosette".  
  
But she had long since faded from the dreams, and, with the girl gone as well, his dreams were nothing but darkness.


End file.
